It is known that two or more vehicles moving along a roadway can cooperate as a road train or a “platoon” for mutually providing to the vehicles within the platoon various safety and efficiency benefits. A typical vehicle platoon includes a leader vehicle and one or more follower vehicles arranged serially along a single roadway lane. More complicated platoons can span two or more roadway lanes but, overall, the goals of providing enhanced efficiency but more importantly safety to both the platooned vehicles as well as to the other non-platooning vehicles on the roadway most usually dictate the single lane platoon incarnation.
The aerodynamic geometry of the vehicles within a platoon is a significant factor used in determining an ordering of the vehicles. As a general rule, a physically smaller vehicle following a physically larger vehicle will provide a greater benefit. Since commercial box trucks and tractors towing box trailers are in general taller and wider than most flatbed tractor trailer combinations, a maximum aerodynamic benefit and resultant fuel savings is realized by ordering vehicles classified this way such that the commercial box truck and tractors towing box trailers take the leader position(s) in the platoon, while the flatbed tractor trailer rigs take the follower position(s) in the platoon.
In addition to the above, a small spacing between platooned vehicles gives greater benefit in terms of reduced energy consumption. However, a tight spacing between platooned vehicles requires that careful attention be paid to various functional and operational characteristics and capabilities of the vehicles and other external conditions including the overall size of the platoon, weather conditions, relative braking abilities between vehicle pairs, relative acceleration abilities, relative load or cargo size and weight including required stopping distance, and the like. Special attention must also be paid to characteristics of the roadway such as roadway incline, decline, and turn radii. These various safety and efficiency parameters implicate directly or indirectly inter-vehicle safety considerations as well as the overall safety of multiple vehicle platoons.
It is to be appreciated that drivers of vehicles within a platoon have an increased responsibility to operate their vehicles and to operate within the platoon, in a safe manner due to the close operating distance of the platooning vehicles. A Network Operations Center (NOC) may be able to bring two vehicles together which have the capability of platooning, but the drivers of each vehicle may have little to no experience with the other driver(s) in the platoon. One driver may be very cautious and disable the platoon at a moment's notice while another driver may not be attentive and not disable the platoon when necessary or, react too late to surrounding road conditions. When drivers initiate a platoon, they have no way of knowing if the driver of the other vehicle is a good “Platooning” driver.
Although many commercial vehicles are highly sophisticated and are equipped with Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) and/or Adaptive Control with Braking (ACB) used for maintaining a safe relative distance between a leading vehicle and a trailing vehicle, and collision mitigation (CM) systems for avoiding or lessening the severity of impacts between the trailing and forward vehicles using various combinations of transmission, vehicle retarder, and foundation brake controls, the vehicles are not completely autonomous. More particularly, humans drive commercial vehicles over roadways oftentimes together with other vehicles and current ACC, ACB, and CM systems do not use driver quality and/or vehicle performance parameters as factors in their control implementation such as to recommend a vehicle group formation, ordering within the formation, or a fragmenting of the formation when it might be advantageous to split the formation.
One SAE standard is J2945 directed in general to Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC), and a work in process portion of that standard is J2945/6 is directed to performance requirements for cooperative adaptive cruise control and platooning. J2945/6 is intended to define the data exchange that will be necessary for coordinated platoon maneuvers, and that definition of the categories should start with differentiating between platooning and ACC, then determining message sets and performance to realize cooperative vehicles. However, J2945/6 also does not use driver quality and/or vehicle performance parameters as factors in platoon control implementation.
Given the above, it will be helpful to include data relating to one or more driver quality and/or performance parameter(s) in the ordering determination of vehicles in a platoon. Providing driver parameter data including driver quality based on a sum of collected quality rankings such as, for example, platooning experience, current time spent driving, number of hard braking events, number of lane departure warning (LDW) alerts, and the like would be desirable additional information that could to be added into the vehicle platoon ordering and/or platoon splitting and platoon formation calculation and determinations.
In addition to the above, as roadways improve and as vehicles become more sophisticated, travelling congregations having four or more randomly grouped vehicles are not uncommon. Therefore, platoon management taking into account all available parameters including for example driver parameter data including driver quality, becomes ever more important to safe and efficient operation.
It is not surprising that the range of capabilities of vehicles joining these ad hoc “platoons” can be very wide. New aerodynamic and powerful vehicles can join a travelling congregation having some old, slow and heavy vehicles. In certain situations, however, it might be desirable to split a large group of four or more dissimilar vehicles into two or more smaller groups where it can be shown that, overall, safety and efficiency benefits inure to the vehicles of the split groups relative to the original larger existing group. Conversely, it might be beneficial to selectively agglomerate two or more smaller groups into a single larger group where it can be shown that, overall, safety and efficiency benefits inure to the yet to be formed larger single group.
The present embodiments provide for new and improved self-ordering of vehicles in a formal platoon, for new and improved platoon formation, and for new and improved platoon splitting.